Abstract
Pain serves to protect against bodily threat, and therefore initiates protective responses such as attending toward threat-relevant information. Since pain is often exacerbated by executing movements, these motor actions may serve as cues for pain. Up to date, however, pain-related attention during movement remains largely unexplored. While it has been shown that the preparation of a pain-related movement leads to enhanced processing of somatosensory information, it is unclear how the actual execution of a movement interacts with somatosensory attention. In the current study, we examined whether somatosensory processing is enhanced at a moving body part when the movement is expected to be associated with pain. Participants were asked to execute hand movements which were occasionally followed by a pain stimulus. To measure somatosensory attention, a task-irrelevant, innocuous tactile probe was presented on either hand to evoke a somatosensory evoked potential (SEP). The results showed an elevation of the N120 SEP at the hand performing a potentially painful movement, indicating heightened attention toward tactile information at the threatened moving hand compared to the non-threatened hand. Additionally, the P200 SEP also showed enlarged responses when performing a pain-related movement compared to a no-pain-related movement. These results show that not only the anticipation, but also the execution of pain-related movements, may modulate the processing of somatosensory input, driven by attentional processes.
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source densities (CSD) for the PainCue_PainStim condition are presented under the waveform for both the N120 SEP (left) at 121 ms after stimulus onset and P200 (right) at 186 ms after stimulus offset
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Funding
This study was funded by an interdisciplinary grant (BOF14/IOP/067) awarded to SVD and LD from the Special Research Fund/Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (BOF) at Ghent University.
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Communicated by Francesca Frassinetti.
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Clauwaert, A., Torta, D.M., Forster, B. et al. Somatosensory attentional modulations during pain-related movement execution. Exp Brain Res 238, 1169–1176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05790-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05790-2